James Baldwin Civil Rights
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James Baldwin Civil Rights
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James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a writer and civil rights activist who is best known for his semi-autobiographical novels and plays that center on race, politics, and sexuality.
James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, in 1924. He was reared by his mother and stepfather David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher, originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. During his early teen years, Baldwin attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he met his French teacher and mentor Countee Cullen, who achieved prominence as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Baldwin went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, where he edited the school newspaper Magpie and participated in the literary club.
In 1948, feeling stifled creatively because of the racial discrimination in America, Baldwin traveled to Europe to create what were later acclaimed as masterpieces to the American literature canon. While living in Paris, Baldwin was able to separate himself from American segregated society and better write about his experience in the culture that was prevalent in America. Baldwin took part in the Civil Rights Movement, becoming close friends with Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, and Lorraine Hansberry. The deaths of many of these friends influenced his novels and plays and his writing about race relations in America.
Cover of BLK magazine featyring an image of James Baldwin.
Baldwin’s works helped to raise public awareness of racial and sexual oppression. His honest portrayal of his personal experiences in a national context challenged America to uphold the values it promised on equality and justice. He explored these topics in such works as Go Tell It on the Mountain , Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room, If Beale Street Could Talk , and Another Country . Baldwin firmly believed sexuality was fluid and should not be divided into strict categories, an idea that would not be acceptable until modern day. Through his popularity and writings produced at home and abroad, Baldwin contributed as an agent of change to the artistic and intellectual traditions in American society.
Baldwin remained an outspoken observer of race relations in American culture. He would branch out into other forms of creative expression, writing poetry and screenplays, including treatments for the Autobiography of Malcolm X that later inspired Spike Lee’s feature film, Malcolm X . He also spent years as a college professor at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College. Baldwin died at this home in St. Paul de Vence, France, on December 1, 1987, of stomach cancer at age 63. Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House was the subject of the critically acclaimed 2016 Raoul Peck film, I Am Not Your Negro.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the American writer. For other people with the same name, see James Baldwin (disambiguation) .
This section needs expansion . You can help by adding to it . ( January 2022 )
— David Adams Leeming , James Baldwin: A Biography [176]
^ In his early writing, Baldwin said his father left the South because he reviled the crude vaudeville culture in New Orleans and found it difficult to express his inner strivings. But Baldwin later said his father departed because "lynching had become a national sport." [13]
^ Baldwin learned that he was not his father's biological son when he overheard a comment to that effect during one of his parents' conversations late in 1940. [22] He tearfully recounted this fact to Emile Capouya , with whom he went to school. [22]
^ It is in describing his father's searing hatred of white people that comes one of Baldwin's most noted quotes: "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law." [25]
^ It was from Bill Miller, her sister Henrietta, and Miller's husband Evan Winfield, that the young Baldwin started to suspect that "white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason." [38] Miller's openness did not have a similar effect on Baldwin's father. [39] Emma Baldwin was pleased with Miller's interest in her son, but David agreed only reluctantly—daring not to refuse the invitation of a white woman, in Baldwin's later estimation, a subservience that Baldwin came to despise. [40]
^ As Baldwin's biographer and friend David Leeming tells it: "Like Henry James , the writer he most admired, [Baldwin] would have given up almost anything for sustained success as a playwright." [41] Indeed, the last writing he did before his death was on a play called The Welcome Table . [41]
^ Baldwin's biographers give different years for his entry into Frederick Douglass Junior High School. One gives 1935, the other 1936. [44]
^ In the summer that followed his graduation from Douglass Junior High, Baldwin experienced what he called his "violation": the 13-year-old Baldwin was running an errand for his mother when a tall man in his mid-30s lured Baldwin onto the second floor of a store where the man touched Baldwin sexually. Frightened by a noise, the man gave Baldwin money and disappeared. Baldwin ran home and threw the money out his bathroom window. [49] Baldwin named this his first confrontation with his homosexuality, an experience he said both scared and aroused him. [49]
^ Eugene Worth's story would give form to the character Rufus in Another Country . [69]
^ Happersberger gave form to Giovanni in Baldwin's 1956 novel Giovanni's Room .
^ When Baldwin later reflected on "Everybody's Protest Novel" in a 1984 interview for The Paris Review he said the essay was a "discharge" of the "be kind to niggers, be kind to Jews"-type book that he reviewed constantly in his Paris era: "I was convinced then—and I still am—that those sort of books do nothing but bolster up an image. [...] [I]t seemed to me that if I took the role of a victim then I was simply reassuring the defenders of the status quo; as long as I was a victim they could pity me and add a few more pennies to my home relief check." [102]
^ This is particularly true of "A Question of Identity". Indeed, Baldwin reread The Ambassadors around the same time he was writing "A Question of Identity" and the two works share some thematic congeniality. [131]
^ Also around this time, Delaney had become obsessed with a portrait of Baldwin he painted that disappeared. In fact, Baldwin managed to leave the portrait in Owen Dodson's home when Baldwin was working with Dodson on the Washington, D.C. premiere of Another Country . Biographer David Leeming described the missing painting as a " clause célèbre " among friends of Dodson, Delaney, and Baldwin. When Baldwin and Dodson had a falling-out some years later, hopes of retrieving the painting were dashed. The painting eventually reappeared in Dodson's effects after his death. [142]
^ "All-Time 100 Novels" . Time . October 16, 2005. Archived from the original on October 21, 2005.
^ " About the Author ". Take This Hammer ( American Masters ). US: Channel Thirteen-PBS . November 29, 2006. Retrieved June 14, 2020.
^ Gounardoo, Jean-François; Rodgers, Joseph J. (1992). The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin . Greenwood Press. pp. 158, 148–200.
^ Peck, Raoul , Rémi Grellety, and Hébert Peck , nominees. " I Am Not Your Negro | 2016 Documentary (Feature) Nominee ". The Oscars . 2017. Archived from the original on September 5, 2017.
^ I Am Not Your Negro (2016) at IMDb .
^ Variety Staff (February 24, 2019). "Oscar Winners 2019: The Complete List" . Variety . Retrieved January 11, 2022 .
^ MonkEL (August 19, 2011). "James Baldwin: The Writer and the Witness" . npg.si.edu . Retrieved January 11, 2022 .
^ Foundation, Poetry (January 10, 2022). "James Baldwin" . Poetry Foundation . Retrieved January 11, 2022 .
^ Natividad|, Ivan (June 19, 2020). "The time James Baldwin told UC Berkeley that Black lives matter" . Berkeley News . Retrieved January 11, 2022 .
^ Jump up to: a b c d e f Campbell 2021 , p. 3.
^ Tubbs 2021 , pp. 243–244.
^ Tubbs 2021 , p. 122.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Campbell 2021 , p. 4.
^ Tubbs 2021 , p. 248.
^ Leeming 1994 , p. 20.
^ Jump up to: a b Leeming 1994 .
^ Campbell 2021 , pp. 5–6.
^ Jump up to: a b Campbell 2021 , p. 6.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Campbell 2021 , p. 5.
^ Campbell 2021 , p. 19; Leeming 1994 , p. 23
^ sfn 1994 . sfn error: no target: CITEREFsfn1994 ( help )
^ Jump up to: a b Campbell 2021 , p. 41.
^ Leeming 1994 , p. 18.
^ Jump up to: a b Campbell 2021 , p. 8.
^ Jump up to: a b c Leeming 1994 , p. 52.
^ Tubbs 2021 , pp. 351–356.
^ Campbell 2021 , p. 7.
^ Leeming 1994 , pp. 19, 51.
^ Tubbs 2021 , pp. 457–458.
^ Kenan 1994 , pp. 27–28.
^ Tubbs 2021 , pp. 512–514.
^ Jump up to: a b c d e Campbell 2021 , p. 14.
^ Campbell 2021 , p. 14; Leeming 1994 , pp. 23–24
^ Tubbs 2021 , p. 357.
^ Tubbs 2021 , pp. 519–520.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Leeming 1994 , p. 24.
^ Leeming 1994 , p. 25.
^ Leeming 1994 , p. 27.
^ Leeming 1994 , p. 16.
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